Federer Douses the Flames of Doubt — and Nishikori

When human beings are stressed at their office jobs or in administrative positions, they might refer to a hectic day as nothing but “putting out fires.” Roger Federer knows the feeling.

Federer has lived a very tricky existence in 2018. Near the end of his career, he wants to preserve himself for more tennis seasons, but the need to add years to his career makes the individual path through those years more challenging.

Taking a long break in the spring, then coming back in June, then taking four weeks off between Wimbledon and Cincinnati, then taking another break (interrupted by Laver Cup) between the U.S. Open and Shanghai have placed Federer in between two worlds. One is governed by the need for rest, the other by the need for match play. Those twin needs have constantly butted heads this year, making it hard for Federer to find the right rhythm and balance on the court.

In the early stages of his 2018 Shanghai tournament, Federer lived the precarious life of the rusty player who had to face opponents who sharpened their games in previous weeks in Tokyo (Daniil Medvedev) or Beijing and St. Petersburg (Roberto Bautista Agut). He got through those matches, but was blitzed at times. The sets he lost were primarily the result of his opponents playing well, but Federer’s forehand was not especially crisp. He won less by dominating and more by biding his time and staying on court long enough to collect a bit of fortune late in a third set. (We talked about one such episode earlier this week at Tennis With An Accent.)

People wondered, “Is Federer going to play better?” Is Federer going to lift his level of play in 2018 closer to the standard he set in the first months of 2017? Can the old man still access a higher gear when needed?

Enter Friday’s nighttime quarterfinal against Kei Nishikori.

The critics and skeptics of Nishikori would not be incorrect to point out that this was a very familiar Nishikori match: brilliant in sequences which lasted more than just one or two games, focused and lucid from the back of the court, generally strong enough to beat nearly everyone in the sport… but not good enough to beat the Big 3. Nishikori’s serve simply denies him the added margins and resources needed to complement his elite return game. Yes, Nishikori erased break leads by Federer in both sets on Friday, but if his serve could find a place of enhanced reliability, those mid-set breaks by Nishikori would have given him break leads, as opposed to merely regaining scoreboard parity. Federer showed Nishikori how it is done in the tiebreaker, unsheathing his best serve in the right moments to win a straight-set quarterfinal and face Borna Coric in a Saturday night semifinal.

(Side note: Federer also helped Kevin Anderson, a quarterfinal loser to Novak Djokovic, solidify his place in the ATP Race to London for November’s ATP Finals. Nishikori had been chasing Anderson for one of the final spots in the field. This win forces Nishikori to have to post a strong result in Bercy if he is to make the top eight. One key question: Will Juan Martin del Potro be healthy enough to keep his spot? Nishikori might become the first alternate in London. Keep an eye on that development.)

The win is not a mammoth win for Federer. Let’s not make it something more than it actually is. However, this victory does achieve one very simple goal: Federer won a high-quality match against an in-form player. He hasn’t had that many such victories since Stuttgart, when he beat Nick Kyrgios in a thriller and Milos Raonic in a well-played final on grass. He did turn back Stan Wawrinka in the Cincinnati quarterfinals. Against David Goffin, he wasn’t allowed to complete a match because Goffin retired, so that match is hard to evaluate in full. He didn’t go deep enough at the U.S. Open to test his game against a top ATP player. Medvedev was an in-form player, but that match veered all over the place in terms of quality.

This win against Nishikori solidifies Federer’s autumnal season. It gives him an important mental building block for 2019 as much as anything else.

Federer’s next match is against Borna Coric, who beat Matt Ebden in Friday’s other late-session Shanghai quarterfinal. Coric has made two Masters 1000 semifinals this year, both on hardcourts. The last time he made a Masters semi? It came against Federer in Indian Wells. Coric had a break lead in the third set but couldn’t hold it. Now the Croatian gets a second chance against the Swiss in a similar situation.

Should Federer lose to Coric, the result won’t be pleasant for the 37-year-old, but even if he does bow out in the semifinals, this result against Nishikori ensures that he won’t walk away from Shanghai empty-handed.

Can Federer still summon a high level of tennis, especially in pressure-packed moments? Some in the tennis community were beginning to wonder if he could still find a higher gear.

Federer put out that little fire of worry on a cool Friday night in China.

Matt Zemek is the co-editor of Tennis With An Accent with Saqib Ali. Matt is the lead writer for the site and helps Saqib with the TWAA podcast, produced by Radio Influence at radioinfluence.com. Matt has written professionally about men's and women's tennis since 2014 for multiple outlets: Comeback Media, FanRagSports, and independently at Patreon, where he maintains a tennis site. You can reach Matt by e-mail: mzemek@hotmail.com. You can find him on Twitter at @mzemek.

Roughly one-third of a century before Soderling, there was an even better version of him in men’s tennis, at least if we are talking strictly about on-court results and significant titles.

Soderling carved out a career rich in accomplishments and historic match victories. That career was cut short by health problems, but when Soderling played, he reached a considerable height. He didn’t become an iconic player, but his story will be more than a tiny footnote in his era, 50 years from now.

Younger generations of tennis fans are firmly aware of Soderling’s place in the history of the sport. In the 1970s, Adriano Panatta forged a very similar level of standing in men’s tennis.

We know that Soderling is one of only two men to ever beat Rafael Nadal at Roland Garros. Soderling also stopped Roger Federer’s legendary streak of 23 straight major-tournament semifinals reached with his win in 2010, one year after the earth-shaking upset of Nadal.

Panatta can boast of accomplishments which match the Soderling double in Paris: Panatta was the only man to beat Bjorn Borg at the French Open, and much as Soderling scored his two most historic wins in Paris, Panatta did as well. He beat Borg twice.

Panatta, though, took a few extra steps that Soderling wasn’t able to manage. Panatta won Roland Garros after his second win over Borg in 1976. In that same year, Panatta carried Italy to its first and still only Davis Cup championship. Panatta won three points in the Italians’ 4-1 win over Chile in the Davis Cup Final.

Panatta — in addition to his conquests of Borg, his major title at the French, and his Davis Cup triumph — played in one of the most memorable matches in U.S. Open history.

In 1978, the first year of the tournament’s existence on hardcourts at the current USTA National Tennis Center in Flushing Meadows (after decades on the grass and then Har-Tru green clay courts of Forest Hills), Panatta engaged Jimmy Connors in a riveting five-set duel. In the 12th game of the fifth set — in the one major tournament which used a fifth-set tiebreaker at the time — Panatta could only watch as Connors hit one of the most remarkable shots in tennis history.

Panatta’s quality shines through not only in that match, but in the fact that this elite clay-court player was able to test Connors on U.S. Open hardcourts and make the Wimbledon quarterfinals. He struggled on grass but did not allow his struggles to permanently handcuff him on that surface. He displayed an ability to adjust to different circumstances and handle the pressure of competition, allowing his talent to emerge in full flower.

Panatta is, in many ways, the embodiment of what a modern-day Italian talent — Fabio Fognini — always had the ability to be, but has never managed to become.

Adriano Panatta is one of several players from the 1970s who will not be remembered by the global community of tennis fans the same way the giants of the period will continue to be. No, Panatta won’t be spoken of in the same breath as Connors and Borg and McEnroe, much as Soderling lives in the shadows of today’s Big 3 plus Andy Murray and Stan Wawrinka.

Nevertheless, like Soderling, Panatta’s best moments ripple through the pages of time. He is a player — with several contemporaries from the 1970s — whose accomplishments and enduring quality should not be forgotten.

Marin Cilic Knows The Sunshine As Well As The Shadow

It is not easy to concisely summarize many athletes’ careers — not when those careers defy a neat and tidy form of categorization.

What does one say about Gilles Simon, so dogged and relentless yet prone to lapses in concentration? What does one say about Marius Copil, so clearly talented yet only beginning to (potentially) find his range and rhythm on a sustained basis as a professional?

Even the Big 3 are not easy to process — not in relationship to each other. Alone, their stories might be able to be digested and explained with great clarity, but in connection to their two great rivals, each man in that trio becomes a much more layered mystery. If the Big 3 were easy to define as a group, fans would not debate their levels of greatness to the extent they do.

At various tiers of men’s tennis, making sense of a career is not simple.

Of any prominent ATP career this century, few are harder to grasp than Marin Cilic, the king of complexity.

I hasten to say at the outset: Complexity is not bad. Complexity is part of life. Complexity invites us to not settle for the easy conclusion if the reality of a situation demands a more layered assessment.

So it is with Cilic, who helped Croatia win a Davis Cup for the first time in 2018, culminating in his two-point tie on the opponent’s soil against France. As I wrote on Sunday — and as I always stress with Davis Cup — this is not something to check off on a laundry list, a “to-do item” one coldly eliminates in a businesslike manner. This is a moment of profound national meaning for Croatia, especially since it was the last Davis Cup, and even more particularly because earlier in 2018, France had defeated Croatia in the World Cup Final. It meant a lot to the whole Croatian team to win the global championship in another sport. The fact that France happened to be the last obstacle was a bonus — for Cilic, and Borna Coric, and everyone else.

Yet, while this is a team competition, let’s not pretend that of the many dramatis personae in Lille, France, Cilic stood above them. His gut-wrenching loss to Juan Martin del Potro in the 2016 Davis Cup Final against Argentina was supremely shattering. Carrying that scar isn’t easy to do for athletes. We can see, in the second half of Cilic’s 2018 season, a lingering inability to straightforwardly finish sets and matches. “Is he going to blow it again?” is not a rare or infrequent question raised during many Cilic matches.

Yet, for all the questions Cilic elicits when he fails to make the ATP Finals semifinal round (zero appearances in four attempts), or fails to go deeper in a Masters 1000 than he could or should, this man just keeps coming back with notable resilience.

For much of the rest of the world, American individualism is a very ugly thing — not on a conceptual level (individualism can and does represent personal striving to break free of repression or groupthink), but on an applied level. No one needs to wonder which American person represents the excesses of individualism more than any other.

Tennis, however — even in a team concept — is an individual sport. (You might roll your eyes and groan when you read this, but, for the 9,734th time, the American sport of baseball is so much like tennis in this way: Baseball is a team sport defined by individual confrontations and performances. One pitcher goes up against one hitter.) Even with Davis Cup teammates cheering you on and a coach at courtside offering advice on sitdowns, the player has to go out and execute the game plan.

Few American artists are more associated with individualism than Frank Sinatra, who dominated the nation’s cultural consciousness during the decades-long prime of his career. You could ask, “Why select Sinatra out of various other entertainers or singers as an emblem of American individualism?” The answer: Sinatra’s life on and off stage was equally bold, consumed by a runaway appetite for success and pleasure. That doesn’t make him one of a kind, but Sinatra represented that way of being as well as any prominent American public figure in the 20th century. Moreover, unlike Elvis Presley — who exists on the same plane of global fame and American individualism — Sinatra also sang songs which were anthems of American individualism.

Purely as a reflection of a cultural ideal, no Elvis song from his own lengthy canon can match Sinatra’s tribute to American individual striving, “My Way,” which concludes with the following lyric:

The record shoowwws…

I took the blooowwws…

And did it myyyyyyyyyyyy waaaaaayyyyyyyyyyyyy…

This is American individualism, defined.

It is also the story of Marin Cilic. He does keep taking some very significant and high-impact punches, the punches which have caused many other careers to wither and die.

Consider, in the history of tennis, just a few examples of players who absorbed devastating losses and never really recovered from them: Nicole Vaidisova at Wimbledon in 2007 against Ana Ivanovic. Marcelo Rios to Dominik Hrbaty at the 1999 French Open. David Nalbandian in the 2006 Australian Open against Marcos Baghdatis.

So many athletes in various sports never recover from a major psychic blow. We’re only human, after all. We are not gods or monsters.

Cilic? He takes some very big, fat roundhouse punches to the jaw… but undeterred, he finds ways to keep coming back in a meaningful way. He has, to be very clear, redefined his career such that he won’t merely be remembered as “The guy who caught fire for one week at the 2014 U.S. Open, muddling through week one but then torching the field in week two with untouchably great tennis.”

No, he has transcended that narrow categorization and its accordingly limited narrative arc.

Cilic is a lot more than that.

The complexity of his career is not a bad thing. If anything, it is a virtue… because if his career had been easy to categorize, the negative probably would have outweighed the positive.

I don’t think you can make that claim about Cilic — not now. Not at the end of 2018.

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